


A Curious Case of Exam Stress

by high_spring_tide



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Assassins' Guild, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 08:25:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9985226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/high_spring_tide/pseuds/high_spring_tide
Summary: In which it's final exams time at the Assassins' School, and a student makes an ill-advised attempt to mock-inhume the Patrician.





	

Even before the teachers at the Assassins’ Guild started having students perform mock inhumations of Commander Vimes as practice, the students themselves had hit upon it as the object of bets and dares. False attempts on Vimes’s life tend to be most frequent around finals time at the Assassins’ School, when students are most full of bravado and need to blow off steam. One year, however, there’s a student that takes it a step further. Some idiot’s boasting about how brave he is, how last night he made a simulated attempt on the Duke’s life and he escaped with only a few deep lacerations and some superficial burns, and what’s more, he was only a few feet away from getting the Duke in. his sights. And one of his peers finally decides enough is enough, anything Geoff Locklace can do, she can do better, and she gets up, spilling parchment and notebooks and pens from her lap onto the floor. "You know what," she says, "you know What, you think you’re so clever trying to inhume Vimes, well you know what, I’m going to get the Patrician." 

That silences the room, at least for a few seconds, which is exactly what the student was going for. Later, when she’s picking out her gear, she does start to have second thoughts. You hear nasty things about what happened to Assassins who’ve tried to kill Vimes and failed. About those who’d tried to kill Lord Vetinari, no one ever heard anything at all. But she’d pledged to do the fake inhumation in front of all her friends, most of her enemies and a fair portion of her year mates besides. There’s no backing out now. 

So she crosses the rooftops from the Guild, passes over Sator Square, and heads to the Palace. And despite being reckless and overconfident, she is actually pretty damn talented, and she makes it all the way to the Palace roof without getting caught. She’s working on setting up some kind of decent shot when it all goes to hell. The guards, on a regular patrol, catch a hint of movement from a patch of deeper black against the deep gray roof, and head over to investigate. And the student panics. She doesn’t have any crossbow bolts, since actually killing the Patrician isn’t part of the plan, but she does have throwing knives--it is Ankh-Morpork at night, after all--and using them on the shadowy figures coming towards her is more of an instinct than a conscious decision. The first knife hits a guard in the gap between the armor on his shoulder and his breastplate. But the second knife leaves her hand as the momentum of her first throw knocks her off balance. The student falls off the roof. The knife, improbably, shatters one of the panes of the Oval Office’s windows and clatters to the floor at Rufus Drumknott’s feet. 

The guards are somewhat surprised, honestly. They haven’t had to deal with actual Guild-trained Assassins in ages. But they are an efficient enough lot, and they grab the student before she can pull herself out of the rather thorny bush she’s landed in. And they bring her before Lord Vetinari, who determines in short order that (a) she’s a reckless student on a dare; (b) she presents very little threat, except to herself; and, (c) she’s completely terrified. So he proceeds to terrify her even more, before instructing Drumknott to make her a cup of tea and send her on her way. 

Drumknott, however, doesn’t forgive so easily. He makes the student that cup of tea, then sits her down and lectures her for forty minutes on how irresponsible she’d been. The Assassins’ Guild took his lordship off the books for a reason. Does she want to see the city tumble back into chaos and bloodshed? Does she perhaps want to take part in a civil war, as happened after the death of Lord Partridge-Womble eighty years ago? Does she wish to witness wholesale war on the Sto Plains, as occurred following the death of Lord Flagstaff back in the Century of the Mackerel? Perhaps she has relatives involved in trade or finance? Does she understand the magnitude of the improvement in those sectors during his lordship’s rule?

The Assassin tries to protest. She must tell Drumknott that she doesn’t even have any crossbow bolts a thousand times, but the man is unstoppable, and the student, rather against her will, finds herself Thinking About What She’s Done.


End file.
